New York - While newspapers universally have been suffering from declining print readership, their fortunes on the web have been somewhat different, according to new figures from Nielsen Online.

The firm said the unique visitors to the top 10 newspaper websites has grown 16% over the past year, from 34.6 million to 40.1 million.

NYTimes.com led the way with 18.2 million unique visitors, followed by USAToday.com and washingtonpost.com, with 11.4 million and 9.5 million, respectively.

"Despite the current troubles for the traditional newspaper industry, people are visiting newspaper sites more and more often to stay on top of current events," said Chuck Schilling, Nielsen Online's research director for agency and media.

"The challenge for newspaper publishers today is to learn how to capitalize on this active online readership and translate their increasing engagement into revenue."

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http://www.nielsen-online.com/pr/pr_090127.pdf (PDF)